Occasionally, a great answer is added to an old question. Too often, simply because of the age of the question and the lack of public visibility, that answer will not get any votes. Thus as it stands, the highest-scoring answer is often not the best, but simply the best of the first.

and that's why so many people are able to edit others' answers.
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nickfOct 12 '08 at 21:00

Maybe all questions and answers should turn into wiki's after a set time period. Say 2 months
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tdyenOct 13 '08 at 6:22

That's a good idea, automatically turning into a wiki after a period.
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tpowerOct 13 '08 at 7:45

1

What? Turning "old" (for some arbitrary time period) questions into wiki sounds like a terrible idea. What would the motivation be for answering old questions when no reputation will be given?
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hlovdalMar 13 '11 at 0:56

The issue I see with this is that it only counts for 1 vote. I acknowledge that the person asking the question could make the new answer the accepted answer, but that does not really have the community opinion that I think people use SO for.
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Stephen BaileyOct 12 '08 at 20:34

Is this a request to have SO notify users when there's an extra answer to their questions? I think that when an answer you've given gets new comments, it shows in a different colour on your personal page; I'm not clear that it does the same for new answers or comments on other people's answers.
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Jonathan LefflerOct 12 '08 at 21:07

I would give some +1 bonus reputation (only few times per day) when one votes a recent answer to an old question.

Moreover, I would make the Necromancer badge a gold one. Well, a platinum one.
This would be an incentive for people to keep answering old questions. And if you don't want to give a redundant answer, you must read other people's answers first.

If you contribute for some days you will quickly have a stock of answers. These gets voted even days or weeks after you wrote them, and you'll very quickly face the situation that the maximum of 200 points you could get per day are used up overnight.

I get surprising comments on answers I wrote for old questions. These questions may look dead and you don't get the fast kind of feedback that you get from the newest ones, but if the question is good or your answer is good the feedback will come. Either you get points for a week old answer or an interesting comment makes you rethink your question.. Sometimes you get nothing. Who cares.

For me that works. The point-hunting game was fun in the first days but it quickly lost it's fascination. Instead I now answer because you want to learn, have nice chit-chats in the comments and give back to the community.

It is not the points that I am interested in, but the value I find in the relative vote that answers are given. I typically read them to be the community opinion on a question. So typically I look at the highest scoring and the negative scores to see what people think is good and terrible.
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Stephen BaileyOct 12 '08 at 20:36

The SO/SE engine and the scope of the SE network sites has changed and expanded quite a bit since this question was first written and answered, so I wonder if others have new opinions on this topic.

My take: Just as commitment decays over time in Area 51, up-votes for answers should decay over time. That way, if a new answers comes in after a year and receives 2 up-votes, that could count the same as, say, 4 up-votes for an answer posted in the first few days after the original question was posted.

Note: I am not proposing that the reputation gained from an answer decays. Just that the answer shown as the top (or second-to-top if any answer has a check-mark) be modified, as well as perhaps showing the decay-modified vote count somewhere. Perhaps this last bit could be a privilege, similar to the privilege to see up-votes and down-votes separately.

To throw in a possible idea, perhaps there should be some sort of frequency metric votes/view ?

But this may be flawed in that the views are currently counted on questions not answers ( Well actually threads, but you can be sure the question was not read not all the answers ), but still perhaps something like that.

On this topic, I find that some old questions have incorrect answers. I try to leave a comment on those questions. Most of the time this seems ignored.

To be honest with you, who made me the authority for determining what is the "correct" way to write a singleton pattern for c#? I did my best and chose the best answer at the time. Stuff changes and a new "more correct" answer may pop up. Just because I asked an question first, does not make me the authority for "the answer", in SO it does.

I think that after a certain amount of time, questions should become community owned. And "the answer" should become community owned (by rolling up all of the data into a single answer)

Perhaps we should allow for duplicate questions, if the new one is more concise with rolled up answers (from possibly multiple questions) - referencing the original.

Perhaps the answer is just to comment-and-wait.

Perhaps we need a meta-moderation scheme.

Perhaps we should allow people to vote that a question is not really answered.

This is why I upvoted you: "Perhaps we should allow people to vote that a question is not really answered."
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eyelidlessnessOct 13 '08 at 6:36

That is why I would not typically mark an answer as the correct one, because who am I to say that is correct ( I might do it however if I though that the votes were wrong... but really that is anti community )
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Stephen BaileyOct 13 '08 at 7:01

For me, anyway, I have found the way books are rated on amazon to be very helpful.
I've also become more critical of reviewers as time as gone by (I can think of one computer book reviewer who must spend his entire life reading basic texts and never gives less than 4 stars).
On amazon I take notice of
1: the number of reviews
2: the star ratings of the reviews
3: how likely the reviewer is to be a sock puppet.